Notes from a Desi Geek

Robby made a great post about geek culture and values. Quoting him:

This discussion is about *culture* of software more than it is about the *profession* of software. Most software people (especially those who hang out here) are passionate about their job. That passion translates into many realities (or at least semi-accurate stereotypes), including 70-hour work weeks, lack of bathing, respect for hacks, working at low wages, etc.

Other kinds of people in other fields, whether professional or service industries, seem to have a clearer work/life seperation. My girlfriend is a secretary, and she works hard and cares about her job, but she doesn’t continue to think about secretarial techniques at home nor argue passionately for different secretarial models at JoelOnAdministration.com until 5 AM.

The geek culture is both a great boon to our efforts and a great boondoggle. We owe much of the world’s technological advancement to Wizards Who Stayed Up Late. While other folks were selling cars, drinking beer and going to the gym, we forged the Internet, created the cellphone, and built Google.

Unfortunately, as seriously as we take ourselves, geek culture has spent practically nothing on PR. Few people outside the community understand or appreciate what we do; consequently they fear and disrespect software and software people. And because we build object libraries for fun (profit? oh yeah, need to eat…), we tend to be less organized about developing methodologies that meet precise business needs.

Our culture needs help, so that people know what we do and why we do it, so that we’re respected like other professionals, and so that loving what you do is the norm rather than the exception.

See the complete thread.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s amazing to find the perception of non technical people about us (geeks). Most of them seem to think that we make *easy* money. They simply can not see the fact that our job is (amazingly) complex. And as geeks, we have completely failed to convey the same. And unless that changes, I don’t think software engineers will get the respect they deserve.

Am I the only one who feels that Bloglines service has slowed down in recent times? I have 200+ feeds in Bloglines, and I get the feeling that it takes longer for Bloglines to show the updated feeds.

If that’s not enough, there are many more ‘planned’ outages at Bloglines. Check Bloglines News page and you will find that there is downtime planned this evening (22nd July 05) as well. Other outages were on
19th July 2005 (unexpected outage)
17th July 2005 (expected downtime)
26th June 2005 (Post about repeated outages)

I can understand that they have huge user base but c’mon, two planned downtime in 5 days (17th July and 22nd July) ? I can’t help but feel that this might have to do something with Ask.com acquistion.

JD

Wow!

That’s the word which came out of my mouth when I saw Fogcreek office full of geeks! [Normally, I give this 'Wow!' reaction only when I see hot chicks in clubs! ;)]

Yes, I attended Fog Creek Open House on Thursday, 14th July 2005.

I was so excited when Joel announced that he will be organizing Open House in July. I have been reading JoelOnSoftware since my college days (when I was in India) and I must admit that his writing has profound effect on how I look at the world of software engineering. I had never imagined that one day I will be in US and will get a chance to meet Joel in person!
So on Thursday afternoon, I left Office at 4:30 and headed to NY City. Instead of taking train, I decided to drive. [Lesson learnt: Never ever drive from NJ to NY City. Best way is to take NJ Transit train. 9 out of 10 times, train will get you to the city faster. ] First I went to Lincoln Tunnel and found that it has 40 minutes inbound delay so I drove all the way north to George Washington bridge. Once I was in City, I parked my car and took cab and finally reached Fog Creek Office on 8th Avenue.

I was late to the party and place was already full of geeks.

Joel was always surrounded by geeks and he was talking about topics like ‘Stock options as compensation method’, ‘How software product company are valued better than software consulting companies (the hockey stick curve) ‘, ‘How Aeron chairs costs few cents a day’ etc.

If you are avid JoS reader, you know that Fog Creek software was founded by Joel and Michael Pryor. I am sure that you know very little about Michael. Somehow he has preferred to be behind the stage. I asked one intern about him and finally I get to meet Michael. Somehow I had impression that Michael is an old guy, but lo and behold, not only he is young (he is 28), he is one _handsome_ chap. Here’s my picture with Joel and Michael.

I found that Michael and Joel met when they were working together in Juno. I asked Michael about what do they do when he and Joel are not in agreement over some particular issue. Michael answered that most of the time, he and Joel are in agreement most of the time, and in one-off cases when they disagree, depending upon who has put his foot down, they let the other person take decision. Joel talked about an incident when their new hire Ben (who did cross country bicycle trip) mailed Joel and Michael whether he can join Fog Creek earlier than his assigned joining date. Not only Joel and Michael both replied in affirmative, they both wrote the same 3 line reply to Ben!

I had always wanted to see Joel’s office and as I had expected, he has very clean and tidy office/desk. (Joel, why don’t you get a black keyboard?)

BTW, the monkey on the desk has ximian.com written on his tee. Here’s one more picture of his desk.

Here is picture of other part of office.

If you were to look through window in Joel’s office, here’s what you will see.

BTW, did I tell you that when you enter in to Fog Creek’s office, first thing you see is Fog Creek Library.

The library has books on Linux, PHP and Perl too! Here’s the proof:

I asked Joel about the secret product he mentioned in this entry on JoS. Joel answered that he wanted to create a product called ‘MailRoom’ which would handle incoming support mails and send appropriate replies/assign it to support personnel. Unfortunately, they killed the product.

One thing I liked the most in Joel’s office was his DJ Gear.

BTW, did I tell you that there was wine and some yummy snacks?

I asked Joel whether it ever happened that he couldn’t hire a person because he couldn’t offer him salary he was expecting. He told me that it happened only once when an intern wanted salary + stock options and he had to turn him down. [Joel doesn't like stock options much.] Finally, I asked him what kind of advice he would give to guy like me who is currently working in IT Services and wants to move to product companies like Fogcreek, Microsoft. Joel said, “Not knowing you personally, I don’t have specific advice. But in general, there is no action plan or strategy which will get you in product company. Just be yourself.” I think he meant that one needs to great programmer (who understands pointers! ) , a good communicator and that’s what will get him in great software product companies.

I also met some interns (couldn’t meet all of them), Babak (first hire by Fog Creek), Paul, Karan and others. Overall, it was one memorable evening, thanks Joel for organizing the open house!

The other day I was chatting to one of my friend and I wanted to tell her something like

Your minutes NOT EQUAL TO My minutes.

And I wrote,

Your mins != My mins.

I realized that I am using programming construct ‘!=’ instead of writing ‘not equal to’. Does it have anything to do with the fact that for last 3 days I am coding for 15 hours a day?

When was the last time you used a computer lingo in your conversation with non geek?

JD

WARNING: I am not advocating hacking RelianceIndiaCall. I am just trying to point out the flaw on their site, in hope that they would fix the issue.

RelianceIndiaCall.com is the premier site for calling cards to India. Though their per minute charge (around 12 cents/minute) is bit higher than what you find on other calling cards site, but their calling card quality is top notch. 99% you get your call through at first try and there are no connection fees per call like other calling cards. Overall, a great service which I highly recommend.

Inspite of the great calling cards, their website SUCKS, it sucks big time. One of the biggest problem with RelianceIndiaCall site is that it’s such an easy target for hackers! To login to their website, you use your cell phone number and 4 digit PIN. Yes, cell phone number and a 4 digit PIN! Getting a desi’s cell number is an easy thing. Once you have cell phone number, you can write a script which tries PIN starting from 1000 to 9999 for given number. I think I need 10 minutes to write such script. RelianceIndiaCall.com stores user’s credit card information (thankfully it’s not visible) and if you wish, you can charge someone’s account by 100$ or so! Obviously, you can use the PIN to make calls to India. In light of this information, I suggest RelianceIndiaCall use this logo:

Moral of the story: If you have RelianceIndiaCall account, keep checking your account for any malicious activity.

Now this is what I call a keyboard designed for geeks!

Check Das Keyboard, these keyboards have blank keys, no alphabets are printed! So unless you are a touch typist and know where your ‘A’, ‘S’,'D’,'F’ are (which all geeks should know), you can’t use it! How cool is that? Now only if it was a little cheaper, I would have bought it.

So, you ask what’s so special about it? I can blank out keys of my existing keyboard. Yes, you can but certainly you can not have different weight attached to different keys? This keyboard features individually weighted keyswitches, which means that you need to use less force from your pinkyto press the letter ‘z’. Here’s the key weight layout (click on image for full size layout)

Great stuff!
JD